"...Huh?"
The holographic projector chirped once, a faint electronic tone, and Otto's face - frozen stiff to the point of comedy - vanished completely into thin air.
The beam of light dimmed. Quiet settled back over the spacious, brightly lit luxury apartment in Arc City.
Theresa slammed her phone down onto the glass coffee table in front of her.
The sharp crack of the screen meeting the tabletop rang through the silent room.
She didn't sit down right away. She stayed exactly as she was, arm still raised from cutting the holo-call, chest heaving with each furious breath.
"Huh?"
She mimicked it - that strangled, off-key note in Otto's voice right before the line went dead.
Theresa ground her back teeth together.
That dead silence, a full half-minute of it. That stunned, cornered inability to fire back a single word of denial.
To the ears of a headmistress who had lived over forty years and prided herself on seeing straight through human nature, it was a signed confession tied off in a Gordian knot.
Grandfather had a guilty conscience.
He was afraid.
Afraid that she, his granddaughter, would tear the whole thing wide open - that "perfect love letter" stitched together out of blood-soaked human experimentation, that conspiracy against the Kaslana and Schariac bloodlines conducted under the banner of "love."
Theresa dropped into the armchair and folded both arms across her chest.
Her brows knitted tight as she launched into a proper great-detective brainstorming session.
By any normal chain of reasoning, whoever could write a script like Honkai Impact 3rd - packed with human experimentation, cloning technology, Herrscher Core transplants, and other unspeakably cruel material - had to be somebody specific.
That man called Su Yu was surely a mad scientist out of one of Otto's secret laboratories.
Or else a black-hearted executioner, the kind who cheerfully handled the Archbishop's dirty work for funding and profit.
Theresa raised her right hand and rubbed her throbbing temple with her index finger.
Then she threw the whole hypothesis out.
It didn't hold up.
"No. Su Yu... is definitely not that kind of villain."
As headmistress of St. Freya, she had met every sort of person there was.
Good or evil, the eyes never lied.
And after more than a month working alongside him at the studio, she had seen it plainly.
Every time Su Yu looked at Kiana, there was a tenderness in his eyes he made no attempt to hide, an instinctive urge to put himself between her and anything that might hurt her. No cold-blooded lab technician ever looked at a "test subject" that way.
More damning still - Theresa had seen it clear as day - that girl Kiana spent all day glued to Su Yu's side.
The distance between those two had blown past the boundary between an ordinary Boss and employee a long time ago.
And besides...
An image surfaced in Theresa's mind, entirely against her will - one that still detonated something in her skull every time she recalled it.
It had happened roughly two weeks ago.
Theresa had meant to drop in on her grandniece under the pretext of showing some familial concern.
Instead she walked straight in on that idiot niece of hers watching, on her phone screen, certain - ahem - high-definition biological reference material and hands-on instructional footage concerning human reproduction.
Theresa had been so startled she nearly dumped her entire glass of bitter melon juice onto her slippers.
She'd concluded on the spot that this was ironclad proof her grandniece's heart had awakened, that the girl's springtime had arrived, and that she was secretly, hopelessly smitten with Su Yu!
In reality, it had been Sirin occupying the body, cramming furiously to figure out exactly what Su Yu and Eden had been doing under that table - but Theresa had no way of knowing there were two souls sharing one body.
"That girl Kiana follows Su Yu around all day like a shadow. She might as well have grown onto him. And the way he treats her is genuine, no question about it."
Theresa drew a deep breath and forcibly evicted that unharmonious image from her head.
So if Su Yu wasn't a bad man, and he and Kiana had feelings for each other, then why was he helping Grandfather with such monstrous, conscience-free work?
Why package those brutal cloning programs and human experiments into a so-called "savior's script" inside a video game?
Did Grandfather have some fatal piece of leverage clamped over him?
Or was Su Yu himself a victim, coerced by Otto through some means he couldn't refuse, forced to lend his name to Schicksal's darkest plans?
Theresa snatched the HOMU pillow off the coffee table and gave it two vicious squeezes.
Guessing and guessing again. It was maddening.
Kaslana family tradition had never involved sitting on a sofa devouring oneself with speculation. When faced with a puzzle you couldn't think your way through, the most efficient approach was simple - go and do something about it.
She made up her mind.
No more guessing.
She was going to plant a miniature bug in Su Yu's office.
If Su Yu really was under Otto's thumb, there had to be regular secret calls between them, orders being handed down. One recorded conversation - just one - and the whole truth would come pouring out.
Theresa hopped off the sofa and briskly smoothed down the skirt of her pink dress.
On her way to the door, the corner of her eye caught two thick volumes sitting on the nearby bookshelf.
The hardcover Honkai Impact 3rd classified setting compendium. Su Yu had had the first-run proofs delivered from the printing house only the day before yesterday.
Theresa walked over and picked up both books, still fragrant with fresh ink.
Since Grandfather had the nerve to do the deed but not to own it, and had played dumb on the call besides.
Then she, as his granddaughter, would have to make sure this "generous gift" reached the places it deserved to go.
She grabbed the marker off the table and scrawled the delivery details across two international express air waybills.
Destination: Europe, Schicksal Foundation Headquarters.
Recipient: Kallen Kaslana.
Recipient: Yae Sakura.
"And for the sender, let's put down... a mysterious good Samaritan who can't stand the hypocritical faces of certain old men."
Theresa patted the box with deep satisfaction.
Once Lady Kallen saw the atrocious human experiments Grandfather had run, laid out right there in the game's setting compendium. Once Lady Yae saw how wretchedly she'd been written, scraping out an existence inside an illusion...
"Grandfather, do enjoy this transoceanic time bomb. I hope the roof at Schicksal HQ is sturdy enough that those two don't bring it down on your head."
Several hours later.
Top floor of Arc City Tower, the core zone of miHoYo Studio.
Behind the glass partitions lining both sides of the corridor, the clatter of keyboards wove together into a dense, unbroken sheet of sound, like a rainstorm that never let up.
Twenty-four hours had passed since Honkai Impact 3rd went into open beta.
The game had gone thermonuclear.
It didn't just squat at the top of every app store download chart - the revenue figures were climbing along a parabola that flatly violated the laws of the market, straight up into the sky.
The entire internet was talking about that snap of the fingers, about the descent of the Herrscher of the Void, about this "charity organization" that had crammed a console-grade action game into everyone's phone for free.
But Su Yu, sitting dead center in the eye of the storm, was in rough shape.
He pushed open the door of his own office, his steps not entirely steady.
He was carrying a cup of espresso with almost no milk in it, and two heavy dark circles hung under his eyes.
These past two days had not been fit for human beings.
Since coming back from that brutal fight at the Spatial Rift on the overpass, he hadn't stopped running for a moment.
First he'd gotten hold of Welt and forcibly pushed back the first activation of Anti-Entropy's "Wotan" mech, which should have taken place today.
The top priority now was the "enhanced Honkai energy detector."
That was their only cheat code for getting advance warning of a Spatial Rift.
Then came the small hours of the morning.
Su Yu had barely finished dealing with the server overload at the studio before he was behind the wheel of that Maybach again, racing off to help Sparks - that troublemaking lunatic of a girl - move house.
He'd stuffed the Masked Fool into an upscale gated community registered under Eden's name, to keep that flamboyant personality of hers from causing some irreversible disaster out in the open.
He'd even assembled her a top-spec liquid-cooled streaming rig with his own hands, six figures' worth of hardware. And then, at four in the morning.
Without so much as a pause, he'd driven out to the "Starfire Furnace" special training base on the city's outskirts.
Waiting for him there was Rita Rossweisse, in a maid uniform, a scythe hanging from one hand.
Three full hours of merciless live-combat assassination training.
Rita's scythe grazed past Su Yu's carotid artery more than once, the cold edge raising a fine crop of goosebumps across his skin.
He was thrown, choked out, driven into corner after corner.
It was seven in the morning before he made it back to miHoYo Studio, aching everywhere.
He managed four hours of makeup sleep on his office sofa, and then at noon Nuwa dragged him into the art team's conference room.
If he hadn't unlocked the second-stage Genetic Lock - if this enhanced body of his didn't possess monstrous recovery and cellular vitality far beyond a normal person's - a schedule like that, run like a hawk kept awake, would have left him lying in the ICU with a tube down his throat by now.
And just now, a closed-door meeting stretching three full hours had finally wrapped.
Su Yu had brought the hammer down, locking in every single frame, every last detail of light and shadow, in the final version of the Final Lesson animation.
That burning Greatsword. That red-haired figure descending from the heavens. Those eyes, gentle and utterly resolute.
The thought of it - two days from now, when the version update dropped, when this era-defining dragonslaying blade came down square on the heads of every player online, when the melody of "Nightglow" began to rise...
All those beautiful expressions. Countless players broken, despairing, sobbing, some of them wishing they could climb through the network cable and murder him personally.
The corners of Su Yu's mouth curled upward and refused to come back down.
He was balanced at a strange threshold right now: mind wildly overstimulated, body utterly wrecked.
"Whew - finally done."
Su Yu pushed open his office door and locked it behind him with a backhanded twist.
He crossed to the broad solid-wood desk and dropped himself heavily into the plush, expensive executive chair.
He shut his eyes, let out a long comfortable sigh, lifted the iced americano and took a sip. And then.
In the very next instant, just as his body went fully slack and prepared to enjoy this sliver of peace.
The intuition granted by his second-stage Genetic Lock fired a top-priority alarm straight into his cerebral cortex!
The way the air moved through the room was wrong.
More importantly... there was breathing.
Very faint, deliberately stifled into broken little intervals, carrying an unmistakable edge of panic and tension.
And the source of it - it was between his legs, underneath that enormous solid-wood desk!
Su Yu's muscles, relaxed a tenth of a second earlier, drew taut as bowstrings.
The exhaustion swept out of his eyes, replaced by a cold light with a knife's edge to it.
An assassin? Or a corporate spy sent by some competitor to steal the new version's secrets?
He didn't raise the alarm.
He simply let his fingers open, casually.
Click.
The carbon pen in his hand dropped onto the carpet.
Su Yu pretended to reach for it, leaning forward slightly, then whipped his head down, his gaze slicing into the shadows beneath the desk like a drawn sword.
And then he froze completely.
All that bristling killing intent evaporated the moment he made out what was under there, dissolving into a speechlessness so total it bordered on the absurd.
No assassin in blacks. No spy with a miniature camera.
Under his desk, jammed into the deepest corner, Theresa was curled into a tiny ball.
She was wearing an adorable little pink dress today, with pure white over-the-knee stockings on her legs.
Her scramble to hide had been so frantic and rushed that the hem of the skirt had ridden up, exposing a sliver of pale, fine-skinned absolute territory.
And at this moment, the young mistress of the Schicksal Foundation, miHoYo's third-largest shareholder, had both small hands clamped desperately over her own mouth.
A coin-sized black listening device was still pinched between her fingers.
Her eyes were brimming with terror and confusion, fixed on Su Yu with the stare of a lop-eared rabbit caught mid-carrot-theft, dangling by the scruff of its neck from a hunter's fist.
Time seemed to fill with thick resin in that instant and grind to a total halt.
The two of them held their bizarre tableau.
Su Yu bent over in the executive chair, head down. Theresa balled up under the desk, face turned up.
Four eyes locked, big ones staring into small ones. Along with the faint coffee smell coming off Su Yu, the air had picked up the scent of a girl's body wash.
Not long before.
While Su Yu was in the conference room, Theresa had used her thorough familiarity with the layout to slip expertly into the CEO's office.
She'd crawled under that broad solid-wood desk and had just peeled the adhesive strip off the back of the miniature bug, ready to press it against the underside of the desktop, when Su Yu's footsteps came clearly from outside the door - followed by the sound of a key entering the lock.
Theresa had frozen solid with fright. There was no time to get out, so pure instinct sent her scrambling deeper into the shadows at the very back of the desk, not daring to draw a full breath.
She'd been certain she was perfectly hidden.
Right up until Su Yu's face, magnified enormously, appeared directly above her head.
"..."
Su Yu looked at those blue eyes on the verge of tears and rubbed his temples, a headache building.
He ran back over his recent conduct.
He hadn't withheld her salary. He hadn't restricted her bitter melon intake. He had even agreed to her utterly unreasonable demand to buff in-game Theresa's attack power by ten percent.
So what was this major shareholder doing in broad daylight, curled up beneath his desk instead of reading manga in her own office?
And holding what looked an awful lot like a bug?
He lowered his voice, thoroughly baffled.
"Theresa, it's the middle of the day... what exactly are you doing under my desk?"
Theresa's face went scarlet in an instant.
The mortification of being caught red-handed, mixed with the Kaslana family's signature instinct to protect its own, detonated through her veins.
What was she doing? Collecting evidence against you, obviously! You accessory, you pawn of Otto's -
She clenched her jaw, braced both hands against the floor and was about to crawl out regardless of consequences, ready to denounce this man with the full weight of her third-shareholder authority and throw the bug in his face while she was at it. Clack.
The office door Su Yu had just locked behind him gave a crisp metallic snap.
It swung open a crack.
And then a bright, energetic girl's voice, thick with delight and anticipation, came drifting through the gap like a gust of wind:
"Su Yu! You're in there, right? I'm coming in!"
It was Kiana!!!
BOOM - !!
The moment that voice registered.
Theresa, hunched in the dark beneath the desk, felt her brain take a hundred-ton siege ram to the skull and dissolve instantly into a sheet of blank white nothing!
It was over.
All of it, over! Completely and utterly over!
Theresa's pupils shook violently, as though hit by a magnitude-ten earthquake.
A horrifying chill by the name of "terminal Social Death" shot up from her tailbone straight through the crown of her head!
Unbidden, that explosive scene flashed through her mind again - the day "Kiana" had been studying human reproduction footage.
In her logic, that had been ironclad proof her grandniece's affections for Su Yu ran bone-deep.
And now!
If, at this precise moment, in this bizarre state - skirt rucked up, clothes in disarray, face burning red -
she came crawling out in disgrace from under the desk of Su Yu, the very man her grandniece pined over daily and had a crush on to the point of madness...
What would Kiana think?!
That scatterbrained idiot of a niece, seeing a scene like this, what magnitude of nuclear device would detonate inside her head?!
[SHOCKING! Auntie infiltrates office, caught in the act poaching her niece's beloved?!]
[ETHICAL CATASTROPHE! Elder steals niece's man, Kaslana family torn apart!]
This had stopped being a corporate investigation or a hostage rescue entirely.
This was a full-blown, reputation-annihilating death arena in which an elder openly stole her niece's man!!!
That nuclear-grade image - enough to kill her socially across the whole of Schicksal, across the whole world - instantly displaced every ounce of her protective fury.
Theresa's face went from flushed red to ashen gray in a heartbeat.
She flung herself forward half a meter, half rolling, half crawling.
Like a desperate octopus, she dove headfirst between Su Yu's legs and locked both small hands around his left calf.
She buried her face in the fabric of his trouser leg and shook her head frantically, the cross ornament in her hair trembling wildly.
She didn't dare make a single sound. All she could do was tilt her face up and look at Su Yu with those big blue eyes swimming with tears, screaming soundlessly with her lips alone:
"Don't say anything!"
"Please, I'm begging you, don't make a sound!!!"
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